Monday, April 5, 2002

Twenty years after his death, William Saroyan is back in
the news. His name pops up nearly every time a column by Herb Caen is
reprinted – in Caen’s eyes, the Armenian-American writer epitomized the
excitement of San Francisco. But Saroyan’s hometown of Fresno has also
rediscovered its native son, devoting more than two months to a
celebration of “Saroyan Festival 2002.”
A portion of Saroyan’s ashes are buried in Fresno, beneath a black
tombstone bearing the inscription, "In the time of your life, live – so
that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of
the world but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it."

But perhaps Saroyan never left the city about which he
said, "San Francisco itself is art,
above all literary art.Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every
home a poem, every dweller within immortal." The following evaluation,
which first appeared in the San Francisco
Flier of May 30, 1996, won its author an award
from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning

A new look at William Saroyan

By John Hutchison

How, finally, do we assess William Saroyan? In his later
years, as Saroyan must have sensed, the boisterous and voluble literary
personage he had always cultivated wore thin, marking him in the eyes of
many as a has-been struggling to maintain a daring-young-man
effervescence long past its shelf life. Within that appraisal was often
a sniggering which dismissed him as a minor talent whose work after
World War II was egregiously self-absorbed and sentimental.

Saroyan's output from 1934 to 1940 established his
reputation. What enthralled critics and readers was the brashness and
certainty of his daring: Beginning with his first collection of linked
short stories – written in 30 days, a story each day – and mailed off to
Whit Burnett at Story Magazine. This was a new, fresh, exuberant
kind of writing, intensely personal, prose poems which departed from
customary narrative structures and sauntered elliptically with the awe
of a young man fully realizing the most self-evident of truths: himself,
alive upon the earth. This was Western writing, innovative and
open, rich with landscapes and vistas, set against the dire backdrop of
San Francisco at the height of the Depression. My recollection of those
first Saroyan stories is typical: watching his language mesh the
spiritual hunger and the actual physical hunger of the penniless
main character was to be in the presence of a breathtaking act of
creation.

Hope and possibility were mandatory components to the
human comedy as Saroyan viewed it. Accepting madness as the only
constant in the universe never precluded joy and laughter. Cynicism had
no place in the way one approached each day. Whimsy, compassion, a ready
smile, and the gift of interior and exterior motion were to be the
tools. These were the qualities for which the critics eventually deemed
him a lightweight. What they lost sight of – and the cultural historians
who will mine through Saroyan's papers and personal effects at Stanford
have not – is that Saroyan's legacy is that of a unique regionalist, and
specifically a Californian. His influence on the writers who have worked
here subsequently is enormous.

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In hindsight, Saroyan's emergence onto the California
literary plain was epochal. The tradition of 19th-century
naturalism exemplified by Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, and Jack London
was eclipsed by Saroyan's sensibilities. In San Francisco in the 1930s,
a variant of that naturalist strain was prominent in the work of
Dashiell Hammett, the city's then-foremost author. The dark, sinister
cast of Hammett's world was challenged by the light, playful
garrulousness and optimism of Saroyan. It presaged a new attitude which
would prevail in the literature of the state and the region for the next
six decades.

I'm reminded of the incident in the early 1950s when a
suddenly timorous Jack Kerouac reportedly met Saroyan and exclaimed, "So
you're the man who wrote 'The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse.' I've
never forgotten that story!" That meeting, one could suggest, was
inevitable. All the ingredients the Beats would incorporate into their
canon had a germinal precedent in Saroyan's work: Rexroth's and
Ferlinghetti's recognition of San Francisco's cultural civility and
bohemian possibilities; Kerouac's interior monologues, frenzied energy,
and catch-all structureless narratives; and the Beat poets' looking
toward the collected wisdom of Asia and its intermixed infusion of
philosophical acceptance, respect for the earth, and simplicity of
style. The wondrous California immigrant experience Saroyan detailed was
a departure from the hardscrabble, menacing accounts of his literary
predecessors. The notion of a welcoming new land open to individual
experimentation was given a necessary new spin by Saroyan, an
interpretation which proclaimed that a dazzling, lightsome place existed
just over the horizon. It's this sense of a region of vast and dramatic
perspectives existing in geological time – the "Voyald," Saroyan called
it – which he has bequeathed to the writers who have since trekked west.

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In turn, those beholden to Saroyan left their mark on
the next batch of literary emigrants. I once remarked to the
uncommunicative Richard Brautigan that his work was awash with
Saroyanesque capriciousness. (I intended it as a compliment and he took
it as such, thanking me in three full sentences – two more than I had
ever heard him utter in one sitting about anything.) It is difficult to
conceive of the hippie phenomenon coming about without a Saroyan-like
oeuvre as precursor, as well the cumulative ethos of the ecology
movement demonstrated by poets like Gary Snyder. Moreover, what Saroyan
added to the crucible of the writer defining his place upon the
landscape was a remarkable insight into the creative process: Always
walking the streets as if for the first time, noting nothing as
insignificant and everything as meaningless, relishing the feel of the
typewriter keyboard, crafting his words and himself as both a defiant
and an absurd cackle at the universe. To our good fortune, unlike his
California contemporaries Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers (and John Muir
before them), Saroyan brought the city into that field of vision,
initiating the onset of San Francisco's literary renaissance.

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I phoned him for an interview 25 years ago for a piece I
was writing. "Well, hel-lo there," he boomed, "and how the hell
are you!" I later sent him a copy of the article, adding a
postscript consistent with puerile admiration, to the effect that I
hoped he would go on forever. Obviously he has, and I guess it's my turn
to say so.